1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a mobile communication terminal, and more particularly to an embedded system and a method for software download in a mobile communication terminal having.
2. Description of the Related Art
An embedded system is installed within consumer products, for example, within most devices having a microprocessor or a micro-controller. Such an embedded system is used to control, monitor, or assist these devices. In addition, this embedded system is also being used in mobile communication terminals.
Currently, mobile communication terminals are marketed with a variety of functions in compliance with user demand. On the other hand, with enlargement of functionality of mobile communication terminals and services of mobile communication service providers, a need to upgrade software loaded in the mobile communication terminals has increased. Accordingly, at present, software loaded in the mobile communication terminals is modularized and, when a software upgrade is required, a current version of the module encapsulating the required upgrade can be provided to the mobile communication terminals through a certain upgrade apparatus, such as a personal computer.
FIG. 1 is a block diagram showing a mobile communication terminal having a conventional embedded system 100. As shown in FIG. 1, the embedded system 100 generally includes a radio frequency unit 110, a control unit 120, a flash memory 130, and a RAM (Random Access Memory) 140. The flash memory 130 includes an area 132 in which operation code of the control unit 120 and user data or parameters are stored. In addition, the flash memory 130 includes an upgrade buffer area 136 in which a current version of downloaded software module is temporally stored. For upgrade of the software module, the embedded system 100 can receive the current version of the software module wirelessly from a base station 10 in a mobile communication system. Alternatively, the embedded system 100 can receive the current version of the software module from an upgrade apparatus 20 such as a personal computer. Here, the embedded system 100 can be connected to the upgrade apparatus 20 physically or by wireless means of a local area network, e.g., a radio communication network. When the software module is upgraded in the embedded system 100, as shown in FIG. 1, code for the software download operation, including at least code for booting and code for software download, are loaded into a code load area 142 of the RAM 140. Then, after rebooting on a RAM basis, the embedded system 100 stores a current version of the software module in the upgrade buffer area 136 with a certain size.
After this, the embedded system 100 stores or overwrites the current version of the software module downloaded into the upgrade buffer area 136, in a corresponding area in the flash memory 130 in which an old version of the software module is stored.
As mentioned above, the conventional embedded system requires a separate storage area for storing data downloaded for software upgrade. It is apparent that such a storage area has to have a capacity higher than that of a software module with the highest capacity of a plurality of software modules stored in the embedded system. This results in increased power consumption and production costs in the embedded system of the mobile communication terminal having a limit to an install area of a memory device.